


Butterfly Between Glass

by Khaleesi1379



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Mild Smut, canon-compliant gay yearning and gay tragedy, depictions of long-term illness, i got up in my feelings about these two and then this happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27682532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khaleesi1379/pseuds/Khaleesi1379
Summary: Cytherea and Loveday, before, during and after everything went wrong.
Relationships: Cytherea the First/Loveday Heptane
Comments: 23
Kudos: 52





	Butterfly Between Glass

When you meet her, you are young. You buckle your sword to your hip with purpose, every part of it shined and sharpened and ready. You contemplate this, this sword that would forever belong to this girl you’d never seen, along with your arm and along with you.

You are Loveday Heptane, and you are to serve as the cavalier primary of the Seventh House, and to the greatest necromancer the House had ever produced. A prodigy, unmatched in her genius, unrivaled in skill, and still growing into her power.

She is younger, and she burns so brightly. You see her for the first time, so much smaller even than you’d been expecting. She’s small, thin and pale and flimsy as all necromancers are, but brighter than a star. The green of her Seventh House robes gilds her slender form as if she was born for it, or it for her. You come out of a deep bow, the supplication of a knight to their lady, and find her grinning up at you with all the light of Dominicus.

“I’m Cytherea,” she says, as if you didn’t already know. She holds a hand out to you, and you think she means for you to bend and kiss it, before she grasps it firmly in her own and gives it a quick shake. It’s more informal than you expected, and you fumble a bit. Her grin doesn’t falter for a second. Her hand is soft, warm inside of your own.

You smile back, before you can help yourself, and the sun suddenly feels warmer and brighter than it had without her.

In an instant, you love her.

It’s improper, for a cavalier to fall in love with their necromancer. Surely the topic of many a sordid novel, of the particular kind that Cytherea delights in. Often during her studies, often when she’s meant to be doing something very important and very necromantic. It’s the type of story that captivates imaginations everywhere, but you know that part of the allure is the scandal it elicits.

Growing up, you had known of the scorn the love between cavaliers and necromancers drew, and you had sneered with disgust at the idea as well. But now, with Cytherea, you can’t for the life of you figure out why that is.

A handful of years together, so few in the grand scheme of both of your lives, and you can’t look at her without thinking of how much you love her. She’s like the moment the sun rises over a meadow, and hits the drops of dew and makes them sparkle like thousands of jewels. That brightness she’d had on the very first day you’d known her had never once diminished, and it wrapped you in a warmth like you’d never known before. For once in your life, you understood the Seventh’s urge to spout poetry. You never had, before you met her. But now, poetry is the only thing that can even remotely capture the dizzying beauty that is your necromancer.

She’s ridiculous. She fusses over lipstick, runs barefoot into the rain, curls up in dusty libraries and waggles her eyes at you over smut novels that she reads gleefully and without an ounce of shame. You don’t think you’ve ever met someone who smiles and laughs so much, and you know that you never did either as much as you do now, with her.

She’s also infuriating. She knows perfectly well which of your buttons to press, and she delights in pressing them as often as she can. A batting of long eyelashes, a kiss lingering a moment too long upon a cheek, a finger dragging across a bicep or chest _just so_. She knows your weaknesses, and she knows that chief among them is her. You had thought yourself a stern and strong-minded woman, once upon a time. Once upon a time, your heart hadn’t belonged to her so completely.

You know they’ll marry her off some day. Maybe to some son of the Fifth, or daughter of the Third. Marry her off so the necromantic line of the Seventh can continue on, to further their political goals, to place Cytherea into power where she so naturally belongs.

Even so, the idea turns your stomach, and you hate yourself for feeling the way that you do. Cavalier and necromancer lines cannot and should not be blended, particularly with a necromancer as strong and singular as Cytherea. Her brilliance is already beginning to shine through the darkest parts of the galaxy, her name becoming well-known in the higher echelons of society. They talk of her, both her beauty and her power, and their talking makes her standing even higher.

Theoretically, there are many reasons you can’t be together. Theoretically, such a union would be scandalous at best, disastrous at worst. But, sometimes, you think that she feels the same way for you. Because there are moments where her lips linger, where her touch turns too gentle, where she holds onto you for longer than she should. You find her eyes on you often, when she thinks you’re not looking. And she finds your eyes on her, as well, and she smiles each time like you and she hold the most delicious secret in the world.

She’d kissed you, once. It was after some party, a night when poetry had been read for hours in a balmy garden, where you’d stood a half-step behind her as she mingled with some dignitary or another. You should have been bored to tears, but watching her in her element always fascinated you. You couldn’t help the little fond half-smile on your face as you did. And she’d taken notice.

She’d been drinking, as she was young and it was a party and she was herself. You’d escorted her back to her quarters, keeping a hand low on her back as she stumbled and swayed her way through the halls. She’d had a dreamy smile on her face, glowing like moonlight, and she’d been humming some song under her breath. She’d tripped as she’d approached her door, and you’d reacted on instinct, catching her and pulling her into your arms in the span of a heartbeat. Her hand was on your chest, her head tilted up toward yours, and your eyes- _stupid_ \- had drifted to her lips.

Her smile was sweet as she looked up at you. You could smell the scent of champagne on her breath. She’d wound a hand into your hair and pulled you to her, her back and your hands meeting the door to her rooms and she brought your lips together. It was soft, gentle, filled with emotion that you weren’t prepared to deal with. Your eyes had slid shut against your own volition. Your stupid, idiot heart hammered against your chest as if trying to burst free. Then she’d pressed her body against you and parted her lips, trying to draw you in deeper. It was then that you recoiled, and you’d felt the loss of her lips and her warmth as if you’d been dunked into glacial water.

You’d stepped back and bowed, saying, “Good night, my lady” in a clipped, formal tone that you hadn’t used with her for years. You saw the hurt in her eyes only briefly, but, coward you are, you fled. She called your name as you left, her tone pleading, but you didn’t turn back.

You think on that night often. You think of the days after when she’d tried to broach the topic and you’d doggedly moved the conversation elsewhere. She’d stopped bringing it up, but it lingered between the two of you even now.

Feelings left unsaid. The possibilities and what-ifs going deliberately unanswered and unexplored.

You wouldn’t be what dragged her down. You wouldn’t be the smear on her reputation, and you wouldn’t put her in the scope of gossip and cruelty. You were meant to protect her from the line of fire, not draw her into it.

You still think of her lips on yours, though. The softness of them against your own still consumes you, still comes to you unbidden in the dark of night. And your feelings haven’t changed.

You knew then, as you know now, that your flesh would be her flesh, your end, her end. She’s too young, too bright and vivid and beautiful for the cancer that is now eating away at her, ravaging her body and soul from the inside. You watch it, every day, as it drains her, turning her pale and crimson and tinging her with copper.

She’s dying.

You see the blood on her lips for the first time when she collapses into your arms. You always felt so large next to her, your arms too long and your hands too clumsy. But she clings to you and drags breath ragged through her lungs. It’s wet sounding, and your stomach turns as you listen to your necromancer drowning in her own blood. She clutches at you, pulls herself into you as she coughs and chokes. You hold her, because there’s nothing else you can do.

The sickness of the Seventh wasn’t unknown to you. It was something that was always whispered about, always sprinkled into gauche poetry and made into beautiful, fanciful tragedy.  
Seeing it before you, ripping its way through your necromancer, through the woman you love more than anything, it was none of those things.

“It hurts,” she whispers to you when the coughing finally stops. Tears slide down your face, and you can’t let her see. You pull her to you, and hold her tighter than you’ve ever allowed yourself before.

“They want to preserve me,” she says, “like an insect. Pin me and press me between glass so my colors never fade.”

She’s always been the perfect scion of her house. Smiling and graceful, poetry spilling from her lips and weaving its way into her twirling, perfect control of thanergy and thalergy. But her eyes are hard now, the lines of her face gaunt and pale and sharper than they should be.

The fascination with tragedy and decay on the Seventh had begun to show its hideous face. They didn’t even have the decency to whisper, as they spoke of their necromantic heir withering, comparing her to flowers or moonlight or whatever shit they continued to spew in their stupidity. They saw the beauty that was your necromancer fading away day by day, and they waxed poetic. There had even been talk of rushing a marriage, in hopes that she’d produce not only heirs to the line, but heirs to the disease that was killing her a little more every day.

You hated them. Hated all of them.

“I won’t let them.” The defiance in her voice embeds itself like shards of glass in your heart.

As the years of illness with her begin to outnumber the years of health, she grows darker. There are deep bags perpetually under her eyes. The soft edges of her have been sharpened. Her light flickers and dims, and you feel dark rage festering inside yourself, as well.

Cytherea’s mortality is no longer something on the far horizon. It’s looming, closer and closer, day by day, and your insides feel like the abyss every time you engage with the thought.

You had wasted it. You had had years with her, years you could have been showing her how much you love her in every way you could. And now she’s living in agony, and you hate yourself for not being able to fix it. There’s no sword you can throw yourself on, no grave wound to take in her place. Only sitting at her bedside, watching her die before you.

She kisses you again, on a day she decides other people’s judgment of your feelings for each other no longer matter at all. Her hands wind their way into your hair, the pale green of her robe slides down her frail shoulders until she’s bare before you. Your eyes never leave hers, half-lidded and beautiful. She moves closer. You can feel the heat of her, feel her chest as it presses against you. You couldn’t stop the way your hands grasp her hips if you tried.

You hold her so very carefully. The calluses of your fingers rasp against pale, paper thin skin. You’re terrified of your hands, your strength. Terrified of leaving bruises, of hurting her worse than she already is.

“Not you, too,” her words rasp against your lips. The fingers against your scalp turn vicious, the nails biting into flesh. “I’m not some corpse waiting to happen. I’m still here. They can all treat me like some long-dead thing all they like, but not you.”

Her lips brush against yours. “Please. I need to feel something. I need to feel you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” The words leave you as a whisper, leave your throat ragged.

She claws at you, dragging you to her until you’re level with the blood-stained snarl marring her perfect mouth. “I want you to _destroy me_.”

Your necromancer’s body collides with yours without warning, and you find yourself tumbling back onto the bed. Your body curls instinctively around hers, bracing to shield her from the fall, but she doesn’t hesitate. She mounts you, hips settling over yours, straddling your waist as she kisses you, the feeling of teeth and the taste of blood between you.

You’re swept up in the heat of her, alive and burning and furious on top of you. Cytherea’s fingers tear at the buttons of your shirt, nails raking across your skin in angry red lines as she pushes your clothes away. Her teeth find your throat and you arch into her. Her name is a prayer, spilling from your lips unbidden.

She finds your hand and pulls it against her. She’s gasping and wet and you curl your fingers into her so easily, the heat of her wrapping around you and consuming you. You can’t help it then. You love her, you’ve always loved her. Your other hand digs into your necromancer’s hip, pulling her down onto you. Cytherea moans as your fingers leave dark bruises against the delicate skin, loving the strength of your fingers both inside and out.

There’s so much anger to her movements, so much righteous anger. Her hips rise and fall, plunging down and down and down again like the tide in a storm. Like she’s trying to prove, furiously, desperately, that she’s alive. She’s trying to find control, in something, in anything, and now she’s finding it in you. And you give it to her.

She’s breathing hard. You are, too. With the dark ringlets of her hair sticking to her cheeks and forehead, the movements of her hips harsh and jagged, and her eyes blazing back into yours with defiance and love, she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

It takes you longer than it should to notice that her breathing doesn’t sound right, the labored gasps being strangled by the fluid in her lungs. Your eyes go wide, never hesitating as you seize your necromancer’s hips and remove your fingers in a flurry of fearful motion. Cytherea snarls at you, “Don’t you _dare_ -,” but you’re already flipping the tangle of your forms, using the bulk of your body to pin Cytherea to the bed.

Cytherea fights you, nails tearing at skin as she shoves, the strength of her entire feeble body raging against you. “Stop, stop,” you rasp against her temple, brushing your lips against the damp skin. You lay Cytherea down, move down her body, spread her thighs and take your place between them.

Your eyes never leave hers, and you can see her lose herself in your gaze. Your hand takes your necromancer’s, placing it on the back of your scalp. You move your head down, feeling those thin fingers curl into your hair, your breath hot against the place Cytherea needs you most.

“Show me.”

You hold her after, as you will many times over. You lay her back, have her draw in deep, even breaths. Your hands run through her hair, fingers soothe the heat of her skin. She kisses you; she always does. Her lips are soft against yours, and you know you belong to her entirely.

“I love you,” she says against your lips.

“I love you,” you say back, feeling the words with every shred of your being.

“You deserve better,” she says to you once, hapless smile tinged crimson. “A real necromancer, not a living corpse.”

The blood on her lips contrasts disturbingly with the medical white of her sick bed. The fluorescent lights cast her in a sickly light, highlighting the hollowness of her cheeks and the stuttering rise and fall of her chest.

Her fingers brush your hair, and you can’t help but lean into her touch. “A cavalier worthy of a lyctor,” she whispers.

You look up, into those dark eyes. “I know where I belong,” you say. And you do. You always have.

“I won’t,” she says after you meet God, after you meet His saints, after He tells you how to save her. Her eyes blaze up at you, livid and alight. “I won’t do it. Don’t you dare ask that of me.”

“I’m your cavalier,” you say, “It’s what I’m for.”

You don’t see it, when she slaps you, but you see her. Her chest heaves, the slip of her robe revealing the jagged points of her collarbones under nearly translucent skin. Her hand is frozen in the air, suspended in surprise at having struck you. Her eyes are wild.

“You will _never_ say that to me again. Do you hear me? _Never_.”

You take her hands in yours. They’re so much smaller, and you hate how rough your skin is against hers “It’s the truth, Rea. You know that. You’ve always known that.”

“But I didn’t know _you_.” Her eyes squeeze shut, tears now flowing freely across pale cheeks. “Eternity without you. I couldn’t bear it. I won’t. Don’t ask it of me.”

You move your hands to her face, fingers cupping her jaw and tilting her neck up towards yours. You press your forehead to hers, your eyes slipping closed and the scent and warmth of her washing over you. She folds into your arms, fingers sliding against your own to hold your hands in place against her. You can feel the juddering of sobs through her slender frame.

“But you’d leave me to do the same?”

Red-rimmed eyes meet the deep blue of your own, forlorn and pleading all at once. Your thumb gently wipes a swath of blood away from her lips, the tender touch pushing the tears that had been welling in the smaller woman’s eyes to the surface. They roll, huge and terrible, down Cytherea’s face.

“It’s too much,” she whispers. “It’s asking too much.”

But you disagree. You’ve known since the moment you took up the rapier as a little girl that you were to be a cavalier, a cavalier that would fight, kill, bleed and die to protect her necromancer. It’s what they were meant for, what they all were meant for.

Cytherea is too young, and you love her too much.

If you dying means the woman you love living, then you’ll do it.

One flesh, one end.

“She’ll never forgive you,” says God. Whatever emotion may be in those alien eyes, you can’t read it.

“Will it work?” you ask.

“Yes,” God says.

You leave. You have all the answers you need.

Her cavalier’s body went limp in her arms. She screamed, horrible and pained and primal in the way only true grief can be. She thought of Loveday- beautiful, brilliant Loveday, sliding into the blood-glutted waters of the River. Disappearing, formless and faceless, in that monstrous swirling mire of souls and ghosts. Cytherea would never find her again, never know what it was to be with her again for the rest of forever. Fear sent every bit of her grief and anything else out of her mind. She choked on tears and blood.

She wouldn’t be without her. She couldn’t.

She reached out, and took the supernova into her breast.

They found her, days later. She had preserved her cavalier’s body. It laid before her, perfect, save for the blood radiating from her chest and dried into a pool around her. Cytherea, now the First, took vigil next to the body, pale nightgown drenched with the blood of the woman she loved. God stood before the newest of His hands, His fists, and His gestures, and she met His gaze with eyes a new and brilliant blue. As her God beheld her, Cytherea the First couldn’t help but notice that He didn’t seem surprised, the flat line of his rather plain mouth and those horrid eyes unchanged by the horror before him. The thought slipped from her mind along with all the rest.

She felt God’s arm wrap around her shoulders then. “Come on, then,” the voice of the Emperor Undying said gently. “Let’s get you a cuppa.”


End file.
